


Breaker

by sigo



Series: Riptide [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Armitage Hux Lives, Armitage Hux is So Done, Ben Solo Lives, Dark Side Shenanigans, Kylo Ren Lives, M/M, Memory Magic, Planet Exegol (Star Wars), Post-Battle of Exegol, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Seduction to the Dark Side, Tentacles, The Dark Side of the Force (Star Wars), someone help him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:46:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28536105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Hux crawled from the twisted mass of metal that had once been the Steadfast, shouldering beams aside and praying he would not unbalance something poised to come crashing down and skewer him. It was hot, and the air smelled of rancid smoke. A fire somewhere, burning things that ought not be burnt and putting off fumes. A gloomy, blue sort of light was ahead, and Hux dragged himself toward it. With one final heave, cool air hit his face.A flash of light to his left -- lightning emanating from within the Temple. Hux’s hand went to his blaster on instinct, and he found it missing. Of course. On a whim, he pulled his dog tags out of his collar. The hexagon pendant was broken in half, the lower piece thrown into a pile somewhere to be scanned when the war was won. Recorded as TRAITOR, DECEASED. Another lightning flash, this one accompanied by a distant, wavering scream. The start of it hardly sounded human, but by the end….“Ren?”
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Series: Riptide [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090445
Comments: 18
Kudos: 42





	Breaker

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to Riptide. It really fussed with me! As usual, this is unbeta'd. Connect with me on twitter under @ sigo_ao3 -- I'd love to chat or answer any questions you have about any of the warnings or tags on any of my fics.

Hux crawled from the twisted mass of metal that had once been the _Steadfast_ , shouldering beams aside and praying he would not unbalance something poised to come crashing down and skewer him. It was hot, and the air smelled of rancid smoke. A fire somewhere, burning things that ought not be burnt and putting off fumes. A gloomy, blue sort of light was ahead, and Hux dragged himself toward it. With one final heave, cool air hit his face.

Hux paused once he kicked his boots free of the scrap metal to try and catch his breath. He rolled onto his side and clutched at his chest as if that would make a difference. Even with a blast vest under his uniform, a point-blank blaster shot felt as though Pryde had dropped a TIE engine onto him from a catwalk fifteen feet above. He struggled to his feet, wincing, forcing himself to stretch his arms up and twist to each side, checking for sudden flares of pain. He found none, and that was good. Very good. Perhaps his ribs were all still where they should be.

The ground under his feet was black stone. Bolts of lightning arced low from the cloud cover, striking a hulking mass in the distance. Hux made his way from wreck to wreck, looking for a craft that was anywhere close to functioning. The hard terrain had not been kind to downed spacecraft. Most were twisted beyond recognition. His path took him closer and closer to the...the shape. A building of sorts. What else? It was a Temple.

Finally -- Hux jogged the last few steps to an old TIE model, undamaged. Ren had _landed_ here, not crashed. The fact that the TIE was still here didn’t bode well for Ren, but:

“Not my problem,” Hux grunted aloud, prying the cockpit door open and flipping a couple switches. The lights on the control panel came on. Bless the stars.

A flash of light to his left -- the lightning emanated from within the Temple too. Hux’s hand went to his blaster on instinct, and he found it missing. Of course. On a whim, he pulled his dog tags out of his collar. The hexagon pendant was broken in half, the lower piece thrown into a pile somewhere to be scanned when the war was won. Recorded as TRAITOR, DECEASED. Another lightning flash, this one accompanied by a distant, wavering scream. The start of it hardly sounded human, but by the end….

“Ren?”

Hux shook his head to clear it. Even if Kylo Ren was still inside that cursed place, it was no business of Hux’s. Not after Ren demeaned and demoted him, and dragged the First Order into Sith-led oblivion…. Heaving a sigh, Hux leaned into the TIE cockpit and freed the emergency blaster from its latches under the seat. It was covered in dust, and practically an antique. The sort of blaster Brendol used to carry. At least Ren hadn’t been asinine enough to throw it out when he salvaged this ship from stars knew where. Hux fired it up — it hummed steadily in his hand, a good sign — and then strode purposefully toward the glowing line at the base of the Temple.

Inside, the structure was dark and choked with a smell almost too faint to identify that set Hux’s nerves on edge. It seemed one moment like ozone, and the next like blood. “Kriffing hells,” Hux muttered under his breath. The sound of his own voice was too loud in this tomblike place. Huge hooded statues watched as he walked cautiously onward, their gauntlets clasped over the hilts of swords. A shadow moved at the end of the corridor, whisking around the corner and out of sight. It had looked like Ren, had _walked_ like him, and yet….

“ _Ren_ ,” Hux called out, flooding his voice with irritation to mask the mortifying possibility of fear. No response. “Ren, answer me, or I’m leaving this instant.” A distant shriek again, though it was closer than before. Far too close, and definitively inhuman.

 _Fuck_ , Hux thought, cursing himself for venturing into a cave of horrors after his ill-fated Supreme Leader. Hux turned to walk back the way he came -- to run, if he was honest with himself. He intended to survive longer than a few hours after the crash, after all -- and stopped short. The hall had changed. There was a dead end in front of him, complete with a cracked mirror, gone so clouded with age that Hux’s reflection was little more than a murky smudge. Two paths stretched off into blackness to the left and right. Hux whipped back around behind him, almost expecting to find that way changed too. It remained as he remembered it.

Well, Hux was no coward. He steeled himself and continued on the way forward, trailing the figure he’d seen down a twisting corridor. The light dimmed, cold-burning white sconces fewer and further between, but Hux swore he caught the edge of a cloak fluttering around the next corner occasionally. It didn’t happen regularly enough to be sure, but -- there! A cloak and the heel of a boot, barely discernible in the gloom. Hux switched the safety off his blaster.

When he stepped around this last corner, blaster raised, he found himself in the doorway to a large amphitheater. A wickedly spiked throne made of whirling, floating rubble lay at the center. As Hux watched, it seemed to knit itself back together. The seats in the arena were empty, but when he set foot into the space he thought he heard a whispering susurrus run its way around the vacant colosseum.

“Where are you? Show yourself,” Hux commanded, swiveling the blaster around to check his peripherals. He made his way toward the throne. If years working beside and beneath Kylo Ren had taught him anything, it was that wizards opted for dramatics. He reached it just as the final piece of pointed spikes on either side of the seat floated into place.

Slowly, carefully, Hux mounted the steps to the throne, and reached one gloved hand out to touch the left-hand spike. The fissure where that final piece connected to the whole sealed itself shut under his fingertip, and unconsciousness took him at once, without warning.

  
  


Hux arrived at the lodge not long before dark. It was a vast durasteel structure within dense pine forest native to Arkanis, separated from the nearest sign of civilization by miles of hills and dirt-track speeder roads. Something was wrong, and the insistent nagging of that fact made his skin prickle up. Hux attributed it to the assortment of unpleasant memories he’d made in this place. And to the lack of rain. His whole life on Arkanis, it had drizzled or poured. There were hardly a few dry minutes planetside, yet there hadn’t been a drop here since his arrival. And he couldn’t remember the speeder trip from the station in Scarparus….

“No, I’ve got it. You’re dismissed,” Hux snapped. He took his own bag from the trunk of the speeder, shooing away the droid that attempted it. He didn’t trust anyone or anything else with his blasters and vibroblades. A storm came rolling down the valley, purple lighting grazing the treetops. Thunder growled. The wind plucked needles and leaves from the trees and swirled them up in great gusts, making the forest roll like high grass. His bag safely at his feet, Hux leaned against a brutal steel column for a smoke before retiring inside, watching the foliage and thinking secret thoughts.

Pryde and Brooks lingered just inside the door, snickering over something. Hux could hazard a guess, and didn’t share their mirth. He breathed smoke into his lungs and thought about the shine of blood on knuckles when plasma ran out. He intended to wait for the rain, but the sky never opened.

A warm light roared to life in the hearth at the snap of Brendol’s fingers. His assorted friends and Hux settled into their seats in the parlor after dinner. The room was a dramatic landscape of steel statues and massive bookshelves filled with real paper tomes, stuffed and mounted heads of beasts from every corner of the galaxy baring snarls that Hux rather doubted they had sported at the time of their demise, and more than one liquor cabinet. The only light, aside from the welcome orange glow of the heating element inside the fireplace, was the blue-green tinge of algae lamps. Rustic. Brendol could have had the lodge outfitted with electric lights, of course, but his visitors found the native lamps quaint. The assembled company was merry by the time their bourbon glasses were refilled. The customary story-telling began.

“We were on Naboo,” Pryde said. He was a tall and thin man, with sharp features, who had been graying as long as Hux had known him and appeared to have finally completed the transformation. Now that he’d gone fully silver, he looked wolfish. His eyes were cold blue. “Some friends of mine were visiting from the Death Star. Sulking about defeats in the Clone Wars still, beastly boring.”

“I’m sure,” said Pryde’s company. He was Chiss, introduced as Rast. No one asked after his full name. It was sure to be unpronounceable. He was tall and red-eyed and very blue, as were all Chiss, but thinner than most of his kind. Seeking fortune in the Order he wouldn’t find with his own people, most likely. He was young enough that he still oozed eagerness to impress the old Empire legends around him.

“It was a trying time for the makers of blasters and plasma cartridges,” said Brooks. He was a bald and thick man, not without physical strength. There was plenty of muscle beneath his carefully maintained layer of fat.

“We haven’t left our friends on Canto Bight quite as dry as they were in the final days of the Empire.” This was from Brendol -- his own red hair was fading, and with it the only similarity between himself and Hux. He was broad where his son was thin, with watery gray eyes instead of sharp Arkanan green.

“The _Order_ has corrected a great many of the Empire’s mistakes,” Hux said mildly, and tension so thick it could be cut with a vibroblade descended on the room. Armitage Hux was here perhaps only as a formality, despite having obtained Lieutenant General rank by his own merit. If not for his relation to Brendol, he would never find himself in a lodge like this, surrounded by Imperials. He’d made his disdain for their past glories quite clear on several occasions.

“There’s enough war in the galaxy now to fund three planets’ worth of profiteers,” said Rast, either unable to sense the sour moods of the older officers in the room, or soldiering on anyway. The spell broke.

“Any arms dealer not rolling in credits at the moment suffers a tragic lack of imagination,” Pryde agreed, and the company was chuckling again. He tapped his cigar in an ashtray, which quickly whirred and sifted away the ashes. “An associate of the Nabooan queen invited us to hunt on a royal estate in the lake country. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled air quite so fresh. Begging your pardon, Bren, but this planet is dreadfully damp.”

“Aye, I’ve never gotten used to it. Creeps into your bones, it does.”

“Who was there? You, me, and that chap from Corellia...Ball? Poor fellow.”

“Bell, I think,” Brendol mused.

“Yes. Right then, the three of us made a good time of it. Scarcely saw the queen, but her council was amenable enough. Plenty of liquor and a harem of whores. And they brought that seer in for entertainment, you remember?”

“I do.” Brendol’s eyes lit up with renewed interest. He’d once tried to develop an army of trained Force-sensitives under the Empire. He held a lifelong fascination with the Force: Brendol was prone to ranting about the old methods of the Jedi...and how they could be put to use in the Order. The younger Hux did more than rant -- child procurement was a success for the trooper program. Though of course, Brendol wasn’t as interested in the value of that as he was in his own failed projects.

“A grifter,” Hux said mildly from his spot on the floor near the hearth. “Or a spy. Did they predict your future with a few runes and a flash of light?”

“In fact, she did,” Pryde said. “Mock if you like. It was a rare experience.”

Hux chuckled and closed his eyes, lazing against the wall. “Native Arkanans scrabble in the guts of waterfowl for their fortunes, and I’d wager they learn about as much as your seer did with her tricks.” Hux didn’t have to look at his father to know the man had bristled at the vaguest mention of the _other_ line of Hux’s ancestry.

“She described a black shadow obscuring the future like an eclipse of the moon,” said Brendol. “Said that there was trouble awaiting us. We all laughed of course. The council released two boars in the morning and we wounded one and killed the other. Honor dictated that we track the vulnerable creature and dispatch it out of mercy, but we lost it at the edge of the swamps, and our guides dissuaded us from pursuit.”

“Balked at the precipice of the unknown,” Hux murmured. His father spluttered and stood, and Hux opened his eyes to see Brendol’s hand on the blaster at his hip. Brooks, behind him, had also twisted his face into a scowl.

“I need another drink in the face of this heckling,” Pryde said, thin mouth curled up into an amused smile. He had always been the surest of the bunch, and more dangerous for it.

“We ought to have your tongue for insolence,” Brooks hissed. “A duel would set you right.”

“Gentlemen, this isn’t Wild Space.” Pryde again. “Brooks, you’re among friends. Armitage, perhaps a bit of moderation is in order?” His voice was full of oily paternal condescension that had no place with Hux. It made his skin crawl -- it always had. He almost preferred his father’s neglect to Pryde’s disconcerting attention.

Hux hummed, taking his hand off his own blaster and holding both palms up. He could have been up in a moment and drawn his weapon, putting Brooks down with lethal grace. But then what? There was no gain. “Please. Go on,” Hux said

“Bell didn’t agree with the guides’ assessment and continued on alone. It was a prize pig, after all. Tusks like swords and a shiny violet pelt. He slipped away in the night and was gone an hour before we realized it. The council sent a rescue party into the swamps with a pair of Gungans, but even with those savages’ help Bell was never recovered, nor was the boar. They tracked him to a network of caves, but the caverns were unmapped and treacherous, and he was abandoned to his fate. It became a bit of a local legend, or so I hear. Swamp dwellers claim to hear a man screaming from the catacombs on lonely nights. Scarcely a week later the Death Star blew and the war was effectively over.”

“So which was the trouble the seer predicted?” Hux asked. “Bell, or the war?”

Pryde looked surprised. “Why, the war, of course. Do you not think?”

“The boy’s always had his head on funny,” Brooks muttered.

Brendol got up and lifted the crystal decanter, sparkling in the orange and blue light of the room. “Who needs another round?”

It was late when the assembled company retired to bed.

  
  


Hux awoke in the quiet dark of early morning, sick fear growing in his heart as the storm outside battered the house. Wind howled, but no rain pattered on the windows. He’d been dreaming something anxious -- white snow gone red around a crumpled form. The body of a man he knew, and one he’d rather thought impervious. It had been a dreadful shock to see that body prone...the dream faded beyond reach.

Hux dressed and walked downstairs with the sky still black, and then ventured outside to the speeder barn. It lay across the muddy drive from the lodge. Inside, droids trotted through the gloom from speeder-bike to speeder-bike, preparing them for the hunt. Hux breathed in the scent of the oil the droids were cleaning the others’ blasters with, and the evil stink of Brendol’s Corellian hounds. The pale, toothy creatures brayed and snorted in their pen, blinking small rheumy eyes at him. Hux lighted a cigarra and smoked it leaning against the wall while the scenery through the open door brightened from black to gray.

“There you are,” said Brooks, stepping into the barn. His voice betrayed his surprise: he hadn’t been looking for Hux, but given the good fortune of finding him alone…. Brooks rolled his sleeves up meaningfully. He wore a workman’s breeches and a simple shirt today. Hux didn’t see a blaster on his hip.

Hux smiled as Brooks approached, taking one last long drag of his cigarra, and then dug the burning tip of it into the side of Brooks’s neck, exposed where a uniform collar would have covered him. Brooks yelled and swung; Hux dodged nimbly backward. He gave Brooks a solid kick in the ribs, but the fight was lost as soon as it started -- Hux wasn’t built or trained for a boxing match, and Brooks was far sturdier than he. Brooks landed a solid blow to Hux’s jaw, mercifully not breaking any teeth but mashing his lips bloody, and Hux was down in the dirt. The light from the lamps above seemed to slide back and forth dizzyingly as if he had submerged his head in water.

Brooks stood over him a moment, his broad face shiny, and then he scuffed his feet and moved away. Hux lay for a time, unable to place how long, and then the barn crowded with the hunting party. Rast leaned over him and offered him a blue hand up. Hux wiped his mouth on his own arm first, tasting iron. The pale skin of his arm came away slicked with blood.

“Should I get a medical droid?” Rast asked, his face creased in rather genuine concern.

 _Careful_ , Hux thought, _this lot will eat you up_. He lit himself another cigarra, the click and spark of his lighter making the nearest hound whine. “No,” Hux said. “He’s okay.”

Rast chuckled then, the worry in his features burned away into something much warmer. He leaned in close, clapping one big hand on Hux’s shoulder. His flesh was cooler through the fabric than a human’s would have been, as was his breath on the shell of Hux’s ear. “What have you got against them, anyway?” He asked.

Hux tried to press his lips thin. The lower one was swelling minutely, and his face radiated pain. He looked up at Rast with the pale green Arkanan eyes that had damned him at birth, and said nothing for a time. “I ought to go and fetch my rifle,” he muttered at last.

“You didn’t let the droids tend it?”

Hux smirked. “Course not. I’ll look yours over if you like.”

  
  


The Corellian hounds and the spindly droids that tended them went first, and the rest of the party entered the forest on their humming speeder-bikes an hour later. Pine trees spread around them like a cavern, well-beaten speeder tracks weaving through impenetrable underbrush and into the dim. Rain fell at last, the drizzle Hux’s mind had been searching for. Water dripped steadily from the branches above. As the light brightened at last to the milky clouded white of midday, they stopped for tea.

Brooks took out a tin of chewing tabac and offered it to each of the group in turn, Hux last of all. Hux disliked chewing tabac, preferring a good smoke. He took the offering anyway, and pocketed it when Brooks wasn’t looking. He worked his jaw occasionally to cement the charade.

“I can hardly believe you’re in the war,” Pryde said amiably. “You look far too young.” As if Hux hadn’t been commanding cadets at age five. Pryde continued, “I’d wager you can shoot. You wouldn’t have been invited otherwise.”

Hux hummed noncommittally. He had, in fact, scored the highest marks in riflery the Academy had ever seen.

Pryde leaned closer, conspiratorial. “You ought to show a little gratitude. You’ve great things ahead of you, and great things don’t come easy. You’d never be Lieutenant General now if you hadn’t been hard-bitten as a pup.”

Hux felt his mouth quirk up in a smile. By the way Pryde looked at him he knew it wasn’t a sweet one. “I’ll pay it back in full,” Hux promised.

“I imagine a hunting trip like this is rather dull after living on a Star Destroyer,” Rast said wistfully. “We’re only hunting stag here. Not boars or nexu.”

“Arkanan stag,” said Hux. “You’d best let your preconceptions go. They’re rather ferocious.”

Rast laughed, looking around at the company. “Ferocious! He’s pulling my leg.”

“The beasts are awful temperamental,” Brendol allowed. “And their horns are sharp and thorned. They eat swampy plant matter, but I’ve seen more than one hunter chased up a tree on this old estate. Keep your wits.”

In the afternoon, the party split up. Hux went with Brooks and Pryde to avoid his father. Brooks shot a medium-sized buck that was cornered by the hounds. The killing went swiftly: the animal had been thoroughly mauled before the hunters’ arrival, it’s shaggy gray-green coat slicked rust red. Flowers and moss grew in its hair, a miniature biome destroyed all at once. Brooks dismounted his speeder-bike and cut the beast’s throat with an overlarge vibroblade, sending a hiss and a puff of bloody steam up into the air.

“Not quite as glorious as the old days, is it?” Brooks said.

“Do you remember spear hunting on Tattooine? The sun beating down on us, and an exorbitant amount of whiskey, I confess, almost got me killed.” Pryde slapped his left thigh. “Howler nearly took my leg off. I managed to shoot it dead just before it lunged.”

An hour before dusk, the two groups reconvened, this time lighting up cigarra and passing around a flask. Rast was bubbling with energy.

“The boy found tracks,” Brendol said warmly. “And places where antlers knocked the bark from trees. Those red eyes are keen.”

“How long were the tracks?” Pryde asked, and Rast motioned with his hands.

Hux snorted. “That’s twice as big as any Arkanan stag print. I’d wager you’re exaggerating.”

“I saw ‘em myself after the boy pointed them out,” Brendol snapped defensively. “It’s a prize animal. I’d like a crack at it.”

“Night’s on us soon. The clouds never part here,” Hux said mildly. “The only light will be the lamps on our speeders and the glowmoss on tree trunks.”

Brendol scowled, but acquiesced. They stayed in one of the hunting shacks littered across the property, the hounds kenneled outside. The shadows deepened and the speeders became smoky, slumped creatures outside in the mist. Pryde and Brooks and especially Rast seemed silently glad that Hux had dissuaded Brendol from carrying on through the dark. They were spooked. Arkanan forests emitted an eerie sort of _awareness_ that deepened at night. A sort of menace. This land remembered the sins of its settlers.

Dinner consisted of the buck Brooks had brought down. Hux abstained, unhungry. Looking out into the deepening gloom from their lean-to, Hux suddenly felt along his hip for a water canteen. He hadn’t brought one, and hadn’t missed it. He wasn’t thirsty either. He lit another cigarra, inhaling deeply. Pryde was brewing caf, usually the better half of Hux’s diet, but the smell was unappetizing. It pleased Hux to see Brooks favoring his ribs as he laughed along to Brendol’s monotonous ranting. Hux hoped that kick he’d been able to land was bothering Brooks now. His own bruising was nearly black, and hideous.

Everyone kept a blaster-pistol close at hand as they settled down to sleep, the fire in the hearth burning low. An animal cried somewhere in the darkness pressing in on the one-room shack, and all eyes turned toward the sound. The Corellian hounds snuffled in their cages.

“This wood is called Shadow Mountain in Arkanan tongue,” said Hux, expecting no answer. “It stretches fifty miles north to south. If we sped ten miles east we’d hit the foothills. Some say it’s cursed. Of course, that’s likely to dissuade young people from entanglement with the Academy.” _And Imperials_.

“You oughtn’t let those savages fill your head,” muttered Brendol.

“What I hear in Scarparus, I keep. It may be useful,” Hux said, more to himself than anyone else. “Natives don’t log this place, or hunt here. They say evil lingers. They’re right, of course.”

Pryde’s eyes glimmered. He alone seemed amused. “What makes you say that, Armitage?”

Hux thinned his lips and said nothing, and thought much. Conversation continued on for a while, and then silenced. Hux got up from his blankets and wandered out into the mist to smoke again. The tabac didn’t settle his nerves like he wanted it to.

A twig snapped behind him.

“Want one?” Hux asked. Rast came to stand beside him. He shook his head, red eyes scouring Hux. Undressing him. “Ah.” Hux exhaled and dropped his cigarra, stamping it out. “Have at what you _do_ want, then.”

Rast bowled him over, the both of them rolling onto the damp earth. The back of Hux’s shirt soaked through. The weather would chill him to the bone, if he were not about to get very warm from other activities. Rast mouthed at his neck, nipping there, his body solid against Hux’s. Hux gripped him almost lazily, trailing hands down his spine without really feeling anything. He closed his eyes, knowing exactly where Rast would kiss him before he did it. Knowing that the insistent wriggling against his hip from beneath Rast’s clothes was a thatch of vibrantly indigo tentacles, which had been a surprise...had been…. Hux felt a bubbling in his inner ears and sinuses that seemed to travel through each of his joints next.

He pulled away, and Rast looked at him bewildered, because that wasn’t how it had happened. “I’m sorry, I…” Hux stammered. “It’s only that Ren….” But he wasn’t involved with Ren. Whatever there was between them was too complicated for labels. And Hux wouldn’t meet the man until he obtained General rank. The world bubbled, loose and shining and untethered. The trees overhead seemed to reach for him.

“It’s alright,” Rast said, his face openly confused. “Whatever you want is….”

Hux kissed him, and the scene snapped back into place, the edges of the world solidifying in Hux’s peripheral vision. Rast’s tongue was cool and slick in his mouth, his lips almost soothing against Hux’s bruising. The nagging feeling of wrongness persisted. Hux let himself be partially stripped, only as much as necessary. This was the way of such trysts. Rast was on him, in him, whimpering in his ear. Hux spread his legs as much as he could. Rast didn’t have to thrust. His appendages moved of their own accord. Hux closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in sensation.

When it was over, they returned to camp. Hux pried his hand away from Rast’s when they approached the shack. He was sticky, a frankly unnecessary amount of blue fluids dripping down his thighs beneath his trousers. Sex hadn’t sated him any more than smoking did. He slept. The mist outside swirled as heavy as a pot of soup and the fire was nothing but glowing coals when he woke again. Branches cracked and a black shape as big as a tank circled the lean-to. It stopped and twisted it’s incomprehensibly configured head to survey the hunters’ camp. The beast huffed and continued on its path. Hux lay motionless, not even daring to breathe.

_What in the stars was that?_

The huff had sounded almost like a chuckle, and for the briefest instant Hux had felt a sort of rumbling. It was a sound below hearing, but he _felt_ it in his chest. Hux did not sleep again before first light.

  
  


Brooks didn’t speak during breakfast, simply sitting white-faced, a hand to his ribs.

“Poor fellow looks like death warmed over,” murmured Rast. He’d come to rest beside Hux, closer than Hux liked. He sipped caf from a plastisteel cup. “You might have done him in after all.”

“I saw it in the Academy more than once. Bust a rib and it starts a bleed inside,” Hux allowed, though he didn’t believe his own luck was so good. No, his feud with Brooks would not end so easily.

“He ought to go back to the lodge.”

“He won’t.”

“Why are you here?” Rast asked quietly. Hux glanced toward his father, toward Pryde, to make sure neither of them were tuned in to the conversation.

“I could ask you the same.”

“You don’t care about any stag, that’s certain.”

“What makes you think it?”

“The look in your eyes. They’re beautiful, by the way.”

Hux gave Rast the show of rolling them. “I’m not here to find a lover.”

Rast sipped his coffee. “Point taken. But we can be friendly, surely?”

“What do you see in my eyes besides beauty?”

“Fear, for one. I don’t mean it as an insult. Fear is healthy. I knew fearless men on Csilla. I hunted with them. It’s how I met Enric. Sometimes men forget that the galaxy is a greater killer than we. She wants our blood, our bones. But the kind of fear you’ve got...it’s not pure.”

Hux found himself leaning in, affronted and enraptured at being so seen.

Rast went on, leaning in to mirror Hux, scant inches apart. “You’ve got the look of a man who plays with laserfire. So I’ve been asking myself: what is it in these woods for you? Why are you here? Because maybe I don’t want any part of it.”

“Stars above, boy,” Pryde broke in. “You don’t believe that local racket about the mountain, do you? Let Armitage tell you about how the speeder-tracks through these woods form a Sith sigil seen from above. That’ll keep your skin prickling through the night.” He laughed derisively.

Hux smiled drily. Rast poured out the dregs of his coffee.

“In all my years coming here I’ve only ever sent one man home in a box,” Brendol said. “An expensive one, I might add. Cryo-preserved.”

“A stag got him,” said Hux.

“You’re a card,” Pryde smiled. “The fellow spotted a huge buck moving through the trees and tore after it, trying to plug it from the speeder-seat. He overturned the machine and split his head open on a stone. Damned fool.”

“In other words, a stag got him.”

Rast squeezed Hux’s shoulder, and Hux did not shy from the contact. “Maybe you’re onto something,” Rast smiled. His teeth were even and white, his skin very blue.

 _You’ve made a mistake aligning yourself with me. I’m not your ticket here_ , Hux thought. But Rast wasn’t stupid, and he was free to make his own mistakes.

The party split again on parallel trails, this time Rast with Hux. Pryde and Brooks went ahead with Brendol and the hounds. They entered the deeper, darker part of the forest. The trees were huge and ribboned with moss and fungi. Scant gray light penetrated the canopy. The air itself seemed very green. Dark brambles scratched at the bottom of their speeder-bikes. The fog persisted, and the forest was too quiet as the rain slowed.

“Unseasonably dry,” Hux said, and Rast hummed.

At noon they stopped and Rast took a cold lunch from his saddlebag. Hux waved off his offerings, smoking furiously.

“You felt good last night,” Rast told him, flushing purple.

“I’ve still got your filth crusted on me,” Hux said, not unkindly, exhaling smoke up at the watching trees.

“Who is Ren?”

The hair on the back of Hux’s neck rose. “I don’t want to speak of him.” _We didn’t speak of him, we didn’t_ …. Rast shrugged. Just then, both their wristcomms went off. “They’ve caught the trail of your huge stag.”

“Damn. One of them will do the honors, then.”

“They sent coordinates. Back on your bike and we might catch up.”

The speeder-bike engines growled to life. An hour later, all hell broke loose. Their path continued along the cut bank of a fast-moving stream. Hounds yelped and howled, and the shouts of men carried through the trees. A blaster fired twice. No sooner than Hux and Rast entered a large clearing with a cold blue lagoon and thundering waterfall, they saw Brendol and Pryde afoot, blaster-rifles aimed at the trees on the other side. Dead and dying hounds were strewn everywhere, purple blood staining the mossy rocks of the clearing. A pair of surviving Corellian hounds frothed at the mouth, barking and spitting, tied tight to the wreckage of Brook’s speeder bike to keep them from giving chase. Pryde’s speeder was also demolished, a fiery and smoking heap of twisted metal. Brooks was nowhere to be seen. Pryde’s rifle fired again, the red bolt illuminating the depths of the forest beyond the clearing. Hux caught a glimpse of a beast there, and there was something amiss about the way it moved. At first glance he took it for a stag, but it was indeed far too large, and it moved in a strange and top-heavy manner. It bolted through the trees and disappeared.

“What in all the galaxy’s hells was that?” Rast shouted.

Hux dismounted and walked among the scattered hounds and fired his blaster-pistol three times, putting the gutted and whining ones out of their misery. Two of the dogs had been ripped in half, organs strewn across the ground. Hux looked at the twisting of torn entrails and blood smeared across the rocks, and wondered silently what fortunes were spelled out there, unreadable to anyone here. Pryde approached and passed his flask, and Hux drank wordlessly.

“What happened here?” Rast asked again. His red eyes were wide. He repeated the question until Brendol faced him.

“It speared them on its horns. In all my years, I… it scooped up two of them and pranced about on its hind legs with them screaming and writhing on its antlers. The stag. By the seas, it was black as the gaps between stars. Black as _pitch_.”

Hux’s mind whirred, reconciling what he’d seen with his father’s description. “An Arkanan stag is no tender beast,” he said. “But one has never taken the dogs before.”

“One speeder gone,” said Pryde. “I twisted my ankle dismounting when it charged me. Five dogs killed. I think I nicked the beast. Brooks gave chase.”

“We’ve got to go after him,” said Brendol. “We’ve four hours of light left.”

“I’ll need someone’s speeder,” said Pryde, limping closer. Rast gave his up willingly, mounting Hux’s speeder-bike behind him. It was snug, but with Hux’s thin frame they fit. Rast’s hands rested on his hips. They sped along the tracks both Brooks and the stag had left. The stag’s hoofprints were perhaps even bigger than Rast had indicated.

“He can’t have got far,” Pryde said sourly. “The man isn’t a runner.” It was evident that Pryde had wounded the stag -- its blood spattered fern leaves and puddled onto the ground. But the blood looked queerly old. It was a horrid black-brown, and stank. Eventually the prints left the speeder track and the party was forced to dismount, leaving Pryde behind to hike into the undergrowth, hacking at it with vibroblades to make paths for themselves. All the way, they called for Brooks with no answer. The light dimmed and the trail went cold. The winds were picking up, a biting chill in them, and swirling the fog around so that tracking became a useless exercise.

Pryde called for them, his voice more distant than Hux had anticipated, calling them back. Brendol shouted back at him, refusing to call off the search, and blundered onward. He had always been closest to Brooks.

“Fool,” Hux muttered.

Rast sat down to rest on the large exposed roots of a tree. His face was a deeper blue than usual from exertion. “I didn’t know what I was getting into, coming to this place. Enric didn’t tell me. I’ve been on hunts on more planets than I could count on my fingers, but this is something else.”

“You think you know what evil is until you look it in the eye.”

“We haven’t done that yet,” said Rast. “And I don’t want to. I’m not faint-hearted, but this… judging by what happened to your father’s hounds, we might be in trouble.”

Hux had no argument with that. He turned in a slow circle, observing the way that the fog shifted like curtains around them. The night had abruptly surged upon the forest, and now the shadows between the trees turned inky. Every hair on Hux’s body stood on end. Heaving a sigh, Hux looked at Rast and then back the way they’d come.

“Pryde!” Hux barked. “Call out. We’re coming back to you!”

They waited. No answer. Rast stood, looking apprehensively at Hux. Hux twisted the other way and called for his father and then again for Pryde, to no avail.

“Let’s go,” Rast motioned toward the hacked-away underbrush. “We’ll go and find the speeders. If he’s left us there will still be two there. We’ll leave your father’s and ride double back to the lodge.” A sudden scream further into the woods made both of them jump. It hadn’t been animal. “Was that your--”

“No.” It hadn’t been Brendol, but Hux would still know that voice anywhere. “Ren.” Hux looked at Rast. “Go back. I think you ought to. I’m going forward.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Hell of a time for chivalry.”

Rast stepped close, closing a hand around Hux’s shoulder. “I’m not leaving you out here, Hux. If you’re going forward, so am I.”

“Then you’d never have made it far in the Order.” Hux shrugged him off and pushed aside a branch to move on.

“You’re going after this ‘Ren’,” Rast said defensively, following close. “And your father chased after Brooks.”

“Brooks and Father won’t outlive Pryde,” Hux grunted, swiping at brambles with his knife. “I did, but only through...through _luck_. Or something worse.”

“What?”

“Shh,” Hux held a hand up. Branches creaked overhead. An unearthly stillness descended on the wood around them. Hux stared ahead at the slimy bark of a moss-covered tree. He listened the way that a loth-rat listens for predators creeping through the grass. There was a muted blue glow ahead; the same sort of light that emitted from certain fogbanks on the deep see or from the depths of caverns.

Of Temples.

Hux went forward, groping through the coils of mist, his pistol ready in his right hand. His heart raced and pounded, each beat threatening to knock him off balance.

He stepped into a small grove of twisted trees, and then saw that some of them weren’t trees at all. They were crumbling stone columns different from any Arkanan ruins he’d ever seen. Phosphorescence rose from the earth and cast evil shadows around the clearing, including the leaning statue at its center. A robed and hooded figure clasping a sword in its hands. The figure was stained black by moss and mold and climbing vines. Hux looked upon the statue and felt his chest tighten. This was an idol to a vile Dark, and it radiated evil.

The fog crept into Hux’s mouth and up his nostrils, like a living, searching thing. Something struck him in the shoulders and he collapsed forward, barely twisting out of the way of braining himself on the statue’s base. The strength in his body drained and he lay squashed into the wet, black earth by an imponderable Force. The Force was the only thing keeping him from sliding off the skin of Arkanis and into the icy embrace of the galaxy itself. Hux clawed at the dirt. Skinny green worms threaded his fingers. A spider scuttled across one arm, big and pale and glowing. The statue’s cruel shadow pinned him.

No, it was...it was….

“Get off,” Hux growled, thrashing. Voices whispered out of the mist, the voices of the statue’s makers. The sound of reptile hisses from between needle-teeth, yellow eyes peering around stone columns and then darting away. Images flashed through Hux’s mind, of people in black robes who had dwelt in forgotten places and offered souls to a hungry void, who fucked without tenderness and killed without remorse.

Hux’s nose began to bleed. It gushed. He turned over, throwing Rast off, but Rast was back before Hux could gather himself, grappling with him. Trying to get blue hands around his throat.

“Fresh blood is best,” the statue said, and it was Rast’s mouth that opened, his throat that made the words. “Rich red sweet blood. What can you offer the Dark? What, you feeble man?” Rast’s face was contorted, his jaw working as though invisible fingers held it. His blue tongue worked at the bidding of the statue. A choir sang from the darkness around them, the sound sweet and repellent. Older than any sea. The sulfurous phosphorescent light shifted in hue, purpling and then warming to a shocking red. It illuminated the fog and impossible figures danced on the periphery of the grove.

Hux groped at his side for his vibroblade. He’d dropped it. Where--

Rast’s cool hands closed around his throat, choking him. The red light brightened like a fire, like a fire, _the Supremacy was on fire when Ren_ \--

Hux’s hand found the hilt of his blade and he brought it up, bending his arm at the elbow and driving the knife into the bottom of Rast’s chin. Rast gurgled and spat indigo blood onto Hux’s face. Hux switched the vibroblade on and dragged it down with a horrible spluttering hiss until Rast’s collarbone stopped him. The man fell aside and Hux coughed, taking great weeping breaths. The glow subsided, and Hux was alone in the gloom with the idol.

“That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Hux panted. “That’s the beating heart and bloody maw of it. A sacrifice.” The statue did not answer, and Hux was grateful. The only mouth to use, after all, was his own.

 _I am not on Arkanis. I never was_ , Hux thought. There was evil everywhere, but not like this. The expert killers of the Empire had brought evil to Brendol’s lodge. The wickedness that Hux breathed now in every droplet of the fog was something older than time. Hux could not bear to stay with the statue any longer, and moved on, lost in the endless night.

He encountered more ruins, more idols. Columns rising out of the mist like elastically stretched gravestones. Blue lightning flickered overhead, never accompanied by thunder. Hux got the feeling that the blanket of clouds was in fact the ceiling of an immense structure, its solid weight bearing down on him. Trees were fewer and further between, and he distrusted them. It seemed to Hux that they were only pretending to be trees, solidifying their shape when he looked at them and relaxing into something else entirely the moment he turned away.

The light shifted, condensing in front of Hux to illuminate the body slumped against a broken durasteel wall there. It was brooks, his torso riddled with deep craters ringed by blaster burns.

 _Lend me your weapon, Phasma. It’s more intimidating_.

Hux moved on. He tasted Rast’s blood on his lips. It had been a pain, cleaning all that blood from his floor. A pain. From the floor… Hux pressed his hands against his face and wiped them up and back over his hair, breathing hard.

He stumbled on, splashing through a grotesque mud puddle with stringy faded red hair stuck along the edge. He tripped over something on the other side of the grimy viscera -- a long, pale thigh bone. Hux laughed, and did not recognize his voice.

 _This is nothing a bacta tank will fix_.

The red light grew again, glowing like a warning in the fog,and Hux threw his arms up to shield his eyes from it. A large animal blundered past him, inches from crushing his skull under its hooves, screaming out a piercing inhuman cry. Then it was gone and Pryde came tearing after it and almost tripped over Hux. He gawked down at Hux in the gloom. Both their faces were caked with filth. Pryde’s was nicked and bleeding.

“Armitage,” said Pryde, yanking Hux up. They stood together, Pryde’s hand a vise on Hux’s elbow, almost painful. “Brooks is gone.”

“I know.”

Pryde held his blaster up to Hux’s chest. “Come with me.”

“This didn’t work the last time,” Hux told him flatly.

“I’ve made a deal with them.”

“The price you paid for it was steep as hell.”

Pryde nodded. “You must come. It’s waiting. It whispered to me in the Dark and I’ve made a pact with it. My life for yours. I’ve promised it you.”

“You’ve been tricked. It’s a liar. The Dark never followed through on the promises it made Ren. Your life is gone. It’s gone already. Do you not see that?”

Pryde shoved the blaster into Hux’s chest meaningfully, and it felt real enough. Hux walked as commanded. Another clearing loomed ahead, its bed layered with crumbling stone and sour black muck. Unholy symbols were gouged into the columns here, painful to look at. Torches burned bright and cold, the flames guttering from white to red when Hux entered. It was a killing ground so old the structures felt fossilized. Pryde stood beside Hux, and this time Hux did not wait for him to speak. He knew that blasterfire would come first.

Hux lunged, grabbing hold of the blaster and ramming it up into Pryde’s face. It fired uselessly into the air, and Pryde toppled down into the middle of the clearing with a shallow splash. His face was transformed into a mask of shock and pain.

“Do you understand now?” Hux said dispassionately. “It’s already taken me. You’ve nothing to offer it.”

Brush snapped. The stag stumbled forth from the darkness, not hidden within it but part of it, given form only momentarily. It was rank, the scent of rancid blood choking the air, the scent of five trillion corpses. Black blood oozed from gashes in the animal’s flanks. Beneath the serrated crown of its antlers, it’s eyes were golden and shining. It’s teeth were yellow and broken. Where had Hux seen a shape like these antlers before? Four prongs on each side, like wicked thorns. Lightning flashed blue overhead.

Pryde struggled to his knees, raising his hands in supplication. Hux looked at him and thought wildly that he was a corpse. That he was assembled from pieces already blown apart, charred at the edges. The stag snuffled Pryde’s hair and its long blue tongue lapped at his face. Its muzzle unhinged, coming apart all the way down its graceful neck, baring more teeth. The mouth closed and there was a crunch like a ripe head of purple Naboo cabbage cracking apart.

Hux rested with his back against the stone behind him and watched. When the stag raised its head again it was not a stag at all. It was the shadow of a man made solid. A shadow he knew well. Ren crawled to him across the stone, oozing rotten blood that splattered it black. The pool below was not water after all. Ren put hands on him, one on each of his shoulders, and Hux knew it wasn’t really him at all. It only looked like him, the way that the thing ten steps ahead of him in the Temple had looked like Ren. The world seemed to bubble and boil, coming apart at the shining seams.

Ren’s shadow kissed him, and the taste was sour and powdery like a decaying fruit. Ren’s tongue was blue like Rast’s had been. His spit burned like molten silver, setting fire to Hux’s mouth, to his face. Flames licked up and burst his green eyes. He’d be consumed, then, to the charred black bones. Bones upon an altar to the Dark. It was almost a relief. No, it was. It was. Hux kissed the Dark back with what remained of his face.

  
  


“Here! Over here!”

Hux opened his eyes with a gasp, trying to sit up. Exegol’s clouded skies lay above him, flashing with lightning. He couldn’t rise -- a hand on his chest. He followed it up, up the arm to the face. The scavenger girl. Behind her, the antique TIE he had meant to fly out of this wretched place, before…. He faded again.

Boots in front of him. Not regulation First Order boots. Hux sat up, leaning his head back against the panel behind him harder than he’d intended to. The boots belonged to the traitor, the FN unit. Hux clapped both hands up to his face, running his fingers over his smooth skin. Not burnt. Not burnt away to nothing.

“He’s awake,” the ex-trooper said.

Conversation happened around Hux. Hux tried to listen, tried to absorb it. His mind was racing. He’d been on Arkanis, at the lodge…. No. No, that wasn’t how any of his father’s hunts had happened. Brendol had died under Hux’s supervision, dissolving painfully in a bacta tank. Hux had shot Brooks himself. He’d disposed of Rast when the man became a nuisance years after. And Pryde….

The _Steadfast_. It went down, the bridge blown out into a twisted mass of durasteel. Pryde had been there, like as not, which meant he was--

“Blown apart,” Hux rasped.

Another face leaned in. Dameron. He looked concerned, damn him to kriffing hell. “It’s been nine weeks,” he said incredulously. “You weren’t unconscious for nine weeks. What did you eat?”

Hux shook his head weakly.

“Leave him alone, man. He’s in shock,” said FN. He was looking at Hux as though Hux had grown another head. Hux supposed this was quite the departure from the General a trooper would know. He felt like he might puke, and swallowed frequently, afraid of what might come up if he did.

Dameron looked off to the side, and Hux turned his head too slowly, meeting the scavenger’s wide eyes. Dameron spoke. “Should we warn Ben, do you think?”

“Oh! Yes,” Rey tapped her temple. “Way ahead of you.”

  
  


The old air filtration system of the base shuddered unpleasantly. Sometimes the clouded lights overhead flickered, power directed to maintaining cool temperatures for engineers working on a jungle planet over any other comfort. The white paneling in the detention halls was rusted and flaking, the viewports out onto the treeline smeared with years of grime and condensation.

Hux lay on the uncomfortable shelf that served for a bed in his cell. His hands were folded over his white shirt. His arms were bare, and sometimes he suffered a chill even in the Ajan Kloss jungle. The frigid climate the engineers preferred was not one that suited the cell block, but this base was old and the atmospheric controls were probably centralized. Barbaric.

His hands were frozen white and clammy in the cold, but his shirt stuck to his back and armpits. It needed a wash. His hair was filthy and unstyled, his face obscured by three days of stubble. An insectoid pest scuttled along the wall, too many legs tapping on the durasteel. For the purposes of dying, this room served as well as any other. Hux wasn’t keen on dying, but it was one of the likeliest outcomes, and he could not yet rule it out.

The news holofeeds were drying up, mindless drivel returning to occupy the airtime that war once had. Hux was sure he wasn’t supposed to know that, but the guards in the hall sometimes listened to their comms devices in the quiet hours, and Hux feigned disinterest. The wheel of the galaxy turned toward peace like a superheated plasma current flowing around and around through the coils of a fission machine. It did not stop turning, but the collective populace of the newly-reformed Republic would pretend it had until the next threat reared its head and could not be ignored.

The guard changed outside his cell. Hux had the schedule memorized forward and backward. There was no Ren yet today -- he’d known there wouldn’t be. Ren confided in him about a planned market trip. Ren’s motive in continuing to waste hours seated outside Hux’s cell was lost on Hux, but he wouldn’t look a gift orbak in the mouth.

“I’d kill for a cigarra,” Hux intoned, not caring who did or didn’t hear.

“You and me both, buddy,” a familiar voice laughed. Dameron, of course. It was his shift. “Finn’s made me promise to quit. Whatever brainwashing you put him through about smoking really worked.”

Hux turned his face to smirk at the man. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Dameron looked wryly amused. Why not be in good humor? His side won. “Fresh out. Sorry, Hugs.” His wristcomm sounded then, Connix waiting patiently to discuss schedules. Dameron darted out the door to speak in privacy, but Hux heard the words through the durasteel as clearly as if he had thought them himself.

His transport to the seat of the New Republic was scheduled for the next morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Hux is so fun to write because the man loves to justify everything to himself. Might as well tag everything with him as 'unreliable narrator'. Like, he's very smart but he's just as bad if not worse than the Imperials he despises. Just in different ways.
> 
> I almost rated this mature because it's not quite as explicit and my other works, but better to be safe. There's tentacles, after all. And penetration. Tricked y'all into reading plot, ha! Obviously this story isn't done, but I will be working on a couple of other things first. I'm feeling a bit like I've lost my touch, but we all move in cycles.


End file.
